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On Geography and War: New Perspectives on the Ardennes Campaigns of 1940 and 1944
Annals of the American Association of Geographers ( IF 3.982 ) Pub Date : 2020-10-08 , DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1807307
Stephan Harrison 1 , David G. Passmore 2
Affiliation  

We use examples from the European theater in World War II to argue that the assumption that combat is typically chaotic yields only limited insight into the large-scale evolution of military operations. To do this we examine the Ardennes campaigns of 1940 and 1944 in the context of explanatory devices used in physical geography such as complexity, nonlinearity, and emergence. We show that during the successful 1940 offensive that eventually led to the fall of France, the Germans were operating close to a set of thresholds in what we call the strategic space; the success of the offensive was contingent on a rapid advance and outmaneuvering of the Allied forces. In the readily defensible tactical space of the narrow Ardennes valleys, small changes in the conduct of or response to the German advance could have forced delays with profound consequences for the campaign. In 1944, by contrast, the Germans were not operating close to a system threshold and the attacking columns were frequently delayed or halted by determined resistance. Even if resistance had been weak, however, a breakout to Antwerp is unlikely to have been sustainable given the superiority in Allied power and the crippling supply problems facing the Germans.



中文翻译:

地理与战争:1940年和1944年阿登战役的新视角

我们使用第二次世界大战欧洲战场上的例子来论证,战斗通常是混乱的这一假设只能使人们对军事行动的大规模演变产生有限的见解。为此,我们在自然地理中使用的解释性设备(例如复杂性,非线性和出现)的背景下考察了1940年和1944年的Ardennes运动。我们表明,在成功导致1940年法国沦陷的成功进攻中,德国人在我们称之为战略空间的一系列门槛附近行动; 进攻的成功取决于盟军的快速前进和机动。在狭窄的阿登纳斯山谷易于辩护的战术空间中,对德军前进的行为或反应进行微小的改动可能会造成延误,给战役造成深远的影响。相比之下,在1944年,德国人的作战步伐并未接近系统阈值,并且进攻部队经常由于确定的抵抗而被推迟或停止。但是,即使抵抗力量很弱,鉴于盟军的优势以及德国人面临的残酷的供应问题,对安特卫普的突破也不太可能持续。

更新日期:2020-10-08
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